The Life of a Pack Rat

I admit it, I'm a pack rat. And my husband, well he's a pack rat too. Two pack rats in one house is not good. Needless to say, we have a ton of stuff. We also have a ton of crap to keep all the stuff company.

We moved into our current house less than two years ago. When we left NOLA I tried to weed out a lot of the crap and toss it before the move. I was partially successful in this task, but by my own admission I wasn't nearly as ruthless as I could have been. We are now faced with the possibility that we'll be moving again this fall for my husbands career. This move is going to be different though. There will be professional movers involved. There may also be a weight limit the company will pay to move. Now it's time to be ruthless.

I started this monumental task a couple of weeks ago by cleaning out my closet. Five garbage bags of clothes to Goodwill later and I had a much emptier closet. I could actually find the clothes I want to wear! And the shoes! And handbags! Oh my! We finished hauling the rest of our stuff from the storage unit to the house this week. Those boxes were mostly filled with books. I decided to go through all the books on my book shelves and the ones in the boxes to get rid of books I'll never read again. Why have I been carting around a statistics book for the last ten years? Or that book on mass communications research? Geesh, that was a boring class and I guarantee I'll never crack that book open again! So into the pile they went along with the trashy romance novels that are my guilty pleasure. Now if I can just get my husband to go through some of his science fiction/fantasy collection, we might actually make some serious room on the bookshelves! Yeah, I can hope anyway...even if I know it's not going to actually happen.

All of this purging got me to thinking, why do I keep all this crap? Or better yet, why do I buy it in the first place? Oh yeah, because I'm an American. It's what we do best: consume things. I'm finding it tough just going through stuff, much less asking myself "do you really need this?" They make it look much easier on those organization shows than it really is in practice. So I'm trying to get rid of anything that hasn't been used in the last year with the exception of holiday decorations. I need to stop buying new holiday decorations though. I do not need anymore Christmas decorations whatsoever. I inherited a large majority of my grandmothers things and many my mom and mother-in-law passed down. We won't even start talking about my obsession with Halloween decorations from Cracker Barrel.

I'd like to say that I've learned a lesson about being a pack rat and that I won't continue this behavior. But who am I kidding? I will be in the exact same boat the next time I'm facing a move. I'll just be purging different stuff that is keeping company with different crap. And I'll be asking myself why I keep all of this all over again. I know this because I know all too well that I'm just like my mother and grandmother. It seems pack rat is a family trait, just like our brown hair.